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Doomsday Clock Remains at Five Minutes to Midnight
Lasrick writes "The Doomsday Clock remains at 5 minutes to midnight. In a letter to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon and members of the UN Security Council, the Bulletin announced its decision and how it was made. The decision to move (or to leave in place) the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock is made every year by the Bulletin's Science and Security Board in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes 18 Nobel laureates. The Clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world's vulnerability to catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change, and new technologies emerging in other domains."
Reasons for the clock remaining at five minutes include the U.S. and Russian not doing much for disarmament increasing nuclear weapon stockpiles in India and China, stalled efforts to reduce carbon emissions globally, and "killer robots."
Seriously, this particular instrument has always been a "be afraid, due to mangled metaphor" instrument for PR, and never really meant anything meaningful and measurable.
I mean, we do lack an objective instrument for how screwed we are as a species, but "any minute now" is just a terribly uninformative model.
Ok, I understand nuclear weapons stockpiles, and natural catastrophes... but "killer robots"? Isn't the doomsday clock supposed to indicate how close we are to global disaster? How does "killer robots" enter in exactly? I mean in the real world, not in the Terminator universe.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Does anybody really care about this stupid metaphor and the idiots in charge of setting the time? It's so ridiculous that when I saw it in a movie I laughed, and then later found out it was real and laughed much harder.
Yep, they exist, and they're basically manifestations of people killing each other just like every other weapon is. Not good, but not worse than what we had before.
"The Clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world's obsession with alarmism"
FTFY
it is and has always been an excuse for (insert administration) to do what ever the F#$&^%* they want to do anyway.
The doomsday clock is what inspires people to keep proclaiming this to be the year of Linux on the desktop.
Where is this Doomsday clock? It certainly can't be Europe or America, because otherwise it'd be at 5 minutes to 11 due to daylight savings.
Summation 2
The real reason the clock remains so close, is the very real possibility of the singularity caused by the Grey Google.
When the Google consumes every last company on earth, what else can they acquire but your matter?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We have an unstable dictatorship in range of several extremely wealthy Asian nations with mutual defense treaties. World War III is just one temper tantrum away.
There's an ocean between Asia and the US...
Sending off drones or other machines/vehicles with weapons into foreign nations, without declaring war, and covertly, seems pretty dangerous to me. Seems like very fertile grounds for an international crisis. Lots of groups will like the idea, not all of them nations.
I am not sure how "pretty dangerous" drones could lead to a worldwide catastrophe, which is what the Doomsday Clock is supposed to indicate.
Since when did the doomsday clock include climate change? Since Al Gore became master of earth?
I'm pretty sure ol' Al had to give that title up when he became Emperor of the Moon.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
The US is a wealthy Asian nation now? Wow that invasion was a quiet one...
Hence the inclusion of global warming as a criteria?
(ducks)
Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons. This has been verified repeatedly by the IAEA. The only people who say otherwise are the Israeli government, because they would really really like the United States to attack Iran. That's why their lobbyists have been working really hard to undo the deal that the Obama administration cut with the Iranians and the rest of the UN Security Council to make sure that the Iranians never get a nuke.
North Korea has had nukes for about a decade now. The serious threat has never been North Korea nuking the US, it's been North Korea nuking South Korea or Japan. They could already do that if they wanted to, and haven't, because they and their Chinese backers aren't really that crazy or stupid. Kim Jong Un has to make a lot of noise like he's going to launch a serious attack in order to gain credibility with the hardliners at home who would probably have him killed if he didn't look like he was one of them. The NK nukes are pretty much there as a doomsday device to make sure the US and its allies doesn't attack them again, and they're doing exactly that.
I am officially gone from
From wikipedia:
Reflecting international events dangerous to humankind, the Clock's hands have been adjusted twenty times since its inception in 1947, when the Clock was initially set to seven minutes to midnight.
They give a good graph here.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
DRINK!
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
"World War III" would require a lot of people involved.
If Little-Fat-Kim nukes anyone, he's going to be playing Saddam-on-ice for a few weeks, while a lot of people use his oppressed citizens as testbenches for their latest cool weapons.
Not a world war, and hardly doomsday outside of the radius of the first nuke, and maybe Pyongyang.
So, if we're doomed in 5 minutes, what does 24 hours represent? What's the scaling factor? To me, it reads as false objectivity.
Actually, yeah.
Not that climate change isn't something to watch (no matter who or what is at fault), but when you consider that (barring an asteroid) climate changes are on a far longer timescale than, say, massive thermonuclear war? Methinks the clock maintainers are looking for new and scarier boogeymen to conjure up, since the end of the Cold War pretty much took away the biggest one they had.
In all reality, there are plenty of things that could spell 'doomsday', even without human action towards that end - problem is, they're kind of unpredictable. Supercalderas/Supervolcanoes, asteroid impacts, Coronal Mass Ejections, you-name-it... can't do jack about those, though, so they have to find something they can point to and say "OMG you need to change your behavior NOW!" I'll leave the validity and urgency of these warnings as an exercise to the individual reader, as your mileage may vary.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
NK attacking its neighbors would be a horrible tragedy, but would certainly not trigger "World War III". China is very sick of Kim Jong Un's crazy shit. The only reason they still prop up the regime is because they don't want 25 million starving refugees pouring into their country.
Agreed 100%.
Instead of focusing on the negative how about focusing on the postive and start calling it the Peace Clock -- A countdown of the progress for every nation to stop waging idiotic wars with one another ??
.. because 5 minutes is not long enough at all to hook up with the hottie down the hall and be all "GAAAA!!! We're all going to die!!! Quick! .. now! In the supply closet!!" So we really need at least 20 minutes on the clock at a minimum. I'm going to write my congressman.
So, if we're doomed in 5 minutes, what does 24 hours represent? What's the scaling factor? To me, it reads as false objectivity.
One minute past midnight means we're all living in a lovely Communist utopia where everyone is happy and fluffy and nothing bad ever happens, Comrade.
Janet Black: Doctor Manhattan as you know the Doomsday Clock is a symbolic clock face analogizing humankind's proximity to extinction, midnight representing the threat of nuclear war. As of now it stands at four minutes to midnight. Would you agree that we are that close to annihilation?
Jon Osterman: My father was a watch maker. He abandoned it when Einstein discovered time is relative. I would only agree that a symbolic clock is as nourishing to the intellect as photograph of oxygen to a drowning man.
The danger from North Korea and Iran isn't that they'll use the weapons themselves. They know the retaliation would be swift and sure.
The danger is that a weapon will turn up in the hands of an organization that would detonate it.
You don't 'have enough nuclear weapons on hand to destroy the world'. That would take a fsckload more than we had even at the peak of the Cold War. That's why the anti-nukes had to invent 'nuclear winter' to make nukes seem scarier.
A nuclear war with the current stockpiles would be a really bad day, but nothing even approaching 'destroying the world'.
People have felt like the proverbial doomsday clock is at five minutes before midnight for most of recorded history. I bet, someday, they'll discover a "doomsday" gene that causes our species to always feel this way. Probably a holdover from our primordial ancestors who were always five minutes away from being some other animal's next meal. Except now we have big brains and can speculate and imagine the future, and the future always looks bleak to us -- possibly because we know we will not be a part of it.
Proverbs 21:19
If by "Seoul" you mean "collateral damage area 1, in which innocent civilians were killed, demonstrating that $dictator was evil and needed to be removed", you do have a point that for a few inconsequential people, the war would not be clean.
Whether Seoul would really turn into Dresden rather than Sderot remains to be seen. The ability of North Korea to inflict more than a propaganda strike on anyone else is seriously limited.
One would hope that the US and Korean military have a whole bunch of tools ready to unleash to convince parts of LFK's army that not all orders should be followed.
But it's not doomsday, barely a small quick regional conflict which might involve a few nukes.
And it's not going to happen, because Kim likes to be alive and knows his odds (actually he has more to worry about his generals doing something stupid so we take him out), and the South Korean and Chinese do not want an influx of refugees.
What's the song? "I hope the [Koreans] love their children too"
What?? Only 5 minutes to midnight?
Damnit, I've been scared way back when from a teenager from the cold war and MAD and all. And now it's terrorists and the economy and the government and global warming and nanobots and job migration and what-all?
You've got to be kidding me. No, that's not right -- you ARE kidding me. Crank that thing up to exactly midnight already and let's get this global party started! Otherwise SHUT THE HELL UP -- things aren't always as bad as they seem. (...or as good as they seem, either.)
By the way, you forgot about the upcoming water shortage and superbug antibiotics problems. Oh, supervolcanos, black-holes and upcoming entropy problems too!
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
Is that Eastern time or Zulu?
No brain, no pain.